honestly I liked the loose ends better

[edenfalling]

I read the Homestuck epilogue(s) today and... that sure was a thing that happened.

I don't think any of it's impossible as an extrapolation from the main story, but neither thread strikes me as an especially plausible end-path for the characters, and while I do enjoy meta-narrative technobabble, I frankly prefer a less... uh... reductive and negative set of options, shall we say. Like, if your story is thematically about escape from the tyranny of narrative inevitability, why pick THOSE particular possibilities as the ones to narrow in on and explore?

Fortunately it's all fundamentally irrelevant, so whatever. I am officially ignoring the whole thing, just like I've already been ignoring the Snapchats and a bunch of the credits. :)

Comments

[mme_hardy]

"Hussie has always made a point of kind of mocking his own audience/fandom, but this definitely felt nastier than before."

Yeah. Nothing sweet or kind happens in CANDY. It's just people being terrible to each other. I have read candy, and this is not it. And everybody who reproduces (except R/K's adoption) is a terrible parent. John and Jane, who had the best Dads, are awful to their children.

I liked the Terezi/John relationship coming back. That was nice. The thing I particularly hate about Jade is that she's not just manipulated, she's actively cockblocking Dave/Karkat, the OTP. And wow, the slut-shaming, for both her and Jake. It's the way some slashers write female characters who get in the way of the sweet sweet M/M. (Not all slashers, obvs.) And Dirk ... like Dirk had more genuine growth than just about anybody in the comic not named Strider. And it's all thrown away. Love for friends? It is to laugh.

Given the ironing ending, Rose is very obviously not happy.

UGH. Some are expecting an Epilogue Epilogue given that the Epilogue had a Prologue. I'd be there to see the loose ends tied up, but I haven't had a good time.

[mme_hardy]

Oh, also also, the Eridan/Feferi forced kiss was GROSS.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, there was a LOT of sexual... uh... I don't know WHAT was going on, really, but it was like all sex was either nasty and full of slut-shaming, or... didn't really exist because it was just two idiots failing to kiss? Which is a lot like the purity culture thing that's been poisoning fandom more obviously in the past several years, come to think of it.

If this was an attempt to mirror that and show it as a terrible attitude, then I think it was a failed experiment since in practice it just makes the reading experience unpleasant and comes off as Hussie's own attitude. Particularly since it infests both timelines regardless of who's narrating.

(Like, Calliope's narration of John and Terezi's car tryst in the meat timeline is actually pretty sweet, but the candy timeline, which is notionally under her control, is even worse in terms of terrible attitudes toward and descriptions of sex and sex-adjacent stuff. *sigh*)

[edenfalling]

Oh, I meant Rose is happy in the candy timeline, but was only able to be so because John's choice not to go back cut her off from the bulk of her powers and the aspect of her personality related to struggles with responsibility and knowledge and stuff. She says so explicitly in the text. And that pisses me off. It's one thing to set struggles aside by one's own choice; it's another entirely to have that decided for you, and by somebody who doesn't even understand what the hell he's doing.

She gets her fate decided by outside forces (read: men) in the meat timeline too -- and again by somebody chopping off part of her life (here it's her relationship with Kanaya) -- but in that case she's clearly unhappy with the results.